Common Ground
by paxbanana
Summary: MES side-story: The conversation Ursa and Katara must share to come to an understanding. Takes place in Book 2. Or in which Ursa reflects upon her family's history.


This has been sitting on my HD, forgotten, for quite some time. Not any indication I will revisit the MES story.

AN: As taesoon and I have discussed, the timeline of ATLA is absolutely screwed up. This won't make sense if you do the math as far as birth years and ages of parents (unless you pretend there's another generation in Ursa's family—which I did—or you pretend that a 72 year old woman can give birth). Just go with it. Takes place after the assassination attempt in the middle of book 2 of MES.

* * *

Ursa wanted to find Iroh and fall into his strong arms to weep. She waved Azula's servant over for a glass of good fire whiskey. Of course Azula never drank, and apparently Katara didn't drink whiskey so it took a few minutes before the snifter was delivered to her hand.

Katara sat across the settee from Ursa calmly. She looked far too calm for what had just happened. Maybe she didn't understand the implications of an assassination attempt against Azula.

Ursa took a long breath of the mint and acetone of the whiskey before she took a bigger swallow than she generally ever took. Today justified the liquor she usually avoided. The warm whiskey heated her throat and belly, and Ursa closed her eyes to find some inner calm.

What she saw on the back of her eyelids was the absolute stone-faced composure of Azula as she balanced her knife in one hand with her sleeve on fire, that fire peeling away the skin of her arm. It had seemed that she hadn't even felt it.

"Why did Ozai choose Azula?"

The question startled her more than Katara's voice. Ursa opened her eyes to regard the young woman sitting across from her. She was a pretty girl, soft and open. Ursa assumed… She didn't know what she thought, but seeing Azula obediently sit at Katara's command had stunned her. And now this girl asked a question that had so many implications, and she asked it without apology. Ursa sensed she wouldn't come out well in this conversation.

She took a sip of whiskey and breathed the hot scent of the alcohol after she swallowed. "The short answer is: I don't know. The long answer…"

Ursa focused on the candle-filled sconce on the wall. How did Azula feel to not be able to communicate with that flame anymore? As rusty and unpracticed as Ursa was, she could reach out and brush that flame like it was a part of her essence. She'd once hoped desperately that Azula would never find her firebending again. Now she wasn't as sure.

Not that her daughter had needed firebending to kill the two assassins. She was as proud of her vicious, unhesitating girl as she was surprised at herself for feeling that way.

She turned her mind to the question Katara had asked. The Water Tribe girl was still watching her silently, apparently patient for the answer, an answer which started several generations before Azula.

"Sozin was an odd man, as I'm sure you've guessed. He and Roku, my grandfather, were comrades. Friends even. Even though Sozin ultimately killed Roku, he loved him until he died. My family never lacked for anything at any point after Roku's death. On his deathbed, Sozin asked his only son, Azulon—Iroh and Ozai's father—to intermingle his line with Roku's."

"Why?" Katara asked.

Ursa swirled her whiskey and took another sip. "Maybe it was a way to give back in his mind: to be sure Roku's descendants shared the glory of being Fire Lord." She was being far too generous, but her family had always only seen Sozin's generosity and not his motivations. "Probably it was more about the supposed power of Roku's blood. His house, too, was of old, noble blood that always produced talented firebenders."

Even Ursa was talented. Had she ever applied herself to her lessons, she would have been exceptional.

Ursa took another sip of whiskey and finally felt its mellowing effects. "Azulon agreed to Sozin's request—as if he would ever refuse a father like his. He waited years before he married, and at that point, my grandmother was simply too old to bear children. The woman he chose, Ilah, was not from my family. I think he actually loved her, honestly. She was also a powerful, prestigious woman."

"Azula said she won three really big battles."

"One of those severely outnumbered and cut off from reinforcements," Ursa replied, thinking that, yes, Azula would have talked about her grandmother. She knew the woman more from books than her life, even though Ilah had died only a year before Azulon.

That gave her a familiar queer feeling. Azulon had always been kind to her, but for him to demand Ozai kill Zuko… She'd looked into his eyes as she pushed her fire-caressed steel blade into his heart. "You ordered my son's death. Find yours instead, old man," she'd murmured into his ear, watching as his eyes widened in pain and anger. Even if he hadn't meant it, surely he would know Ozai would carry out such an order. For that alone, she had no regrets.

"I don't think Azulon cared about the matter, but he kept up with my mother if only for the promise he made his father. She was too old for Iroh. I was too young for Iroh." If only it hadn't been so. Things could have been so much different. "Iroh married a woman from another noble house. The marriage was arranged with a family that was influentially but…dissenting to Azulon."

Of course, Katara was ignorant of such matters. She asked, "What?"

How lovely it must be to have no knowledge of the political twists and turns of the nobility and royalty of this nation. Ursa's time as a commoner wasn't to be envied, but she had been free of those concerns. "Marriage such as that is a double-edged sword. The family receives an immediate boost to its affluence and standing, aside from the fact that their bloodline will continue on as the Fire Lord or royalty." Ursa swirled her whiskey desolately. "But that family no longer can oppose the Fire Lord in any way. They're drawn close, too close to risk even a whisper of treason."

"Sounds like blackmail."

"You can be sure it was. As was Azulon's claim over my family. My parents knew from the moment I was born a girl that I would marry Ozai, the young boy prince."

Katara's expression showed distaste.

"He was a nice boy," she could admit, feeling the softening effects of her whiskey. She could picture wide-eyed, embarrassed Ozai who had blushed and stuttered at the sight of the girl who would be his future wife. "He was shy and clumsy, even when he tried so hard to emulate Iroh or Azulon. And Iroh…"

She could picture Iroh far more vividly than his younger brother. Even as a girl, she had been struck by him. He'd been so intense as a young man, or at least that was how she remembered him: bare-chested, sweating and muscled, completing kata after kata to execute the perfect technique without a hair out of place from his topknot or his thick, black beard. She'd been on the cusp of puberty and that image of his mid-twenties-self had shaped what she found attractive through her life. Seeing a gawky, childish, stuttering Ozai had been such a disappointment to her.

Alcohol loosened her tongue enough for her to admit, "Iroh was an intense man when he was young. Even then I used to wish…" She paused and sighed, remembering too what it had felt like as a teenage girl knowing the man she considered her ideal was married and had a son already.

"You loved Iroh then?" Katara asked her.

"I was too young to know what love was. I didn't know Iroh, but he was an attractive man. He always has been. I never dreamed he'd notice me, even when we were in-laws."

He had noticed her, but not the way she'd wanted at first. He'd been kind in the face of Ozai's unkindness. He'd been happy in the face of Ozai's unhappiness. Even after the death of his wife, he had remained gentle and thoughtful, always asking her how she was, if he could do anything for her. He'd been so good to Zuko, which meant more to her than his attention to her. That was when she'd truly fallen in love with him.

When Ozai left for his campaign to conquer some part of the Earth Kingdom—Ursa could hardly remember—in a desperate bid for the throne, Iroh had started seeing her more and more, looking at her longer and longer. Finally he had brushed his knuckles across her cheek and murmured her name, and it was the sign she'd wanted for a dozen years.

"He softened through the years, especially when I wanted a softer man than Ozai. And he noticed me."

Katara watched her without any apparent judgment. "You loved him when you had Azula?"

She had loved him, and she knew he had loved her. But she hadn't trusted him to take care of her. Ursa had trusted no one but herself at that point in her life. Iroh must have sensed that. Those last few times they'd shared together, she'd known she was pregnant with his child, and he had held her close against his body and murmured about traveling the world as a family, adopting Zuko as his son, of eloping… It had only cemented her determination to step away and protect herself and her children.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do to turn him away…at least until I had to leave my children."

Iroh had drifted from her without much fuss, especially when Ozai returned. He'd turned his mind to other things, apparently content to treat her with formal aloofness once more, but he had never drawn away from Zuko. That alone made her love him more.

Iroh threw himself into accomplishing the goal his father set before him: conquer Ba Sing Se. She'd been shuttled from the Fire Nation long before he returned. Years later, having traveled from western Earth Kingdom all the way to Ba Sing Se, she would sometimes pause and turn to look over her shoulder at an aged man who reminded her of Iroh. Ursa wondered how many of those looks had actually been to the man who had stolen her heart so long ago.

Ursa came back to herself to see Katara watching her with plain pity on her face. She took a heavy sip of whiskey and recalled her former train of thought. Her voice had returned to its usual cadence. "But, anyway, Ozai and I only met a few times before our wedding day, and he changed a great deal in those years. Zuko… He reminded me of Ozai when he was a boy, and I knew what he could turn into if I didn't handle him gently. Ilah was not a pleasant woman. I hoped I could be better."

She had been better with Zuko, but Azula… Her daughter, her girl, a child born from Iroh, was still so very much like Ozai that it frightened Ursa. She had a disquieting thought more than once through Azula's childhood: _Is it from me?_

"I still don't understand why Ozai didn't love his son. Zuko tried so hard to please him; he wanted it so much. How could I let my boy think he wasn't loved? And then for some unfathomable reason, from the moment Azula was born Ozai wanted her."

"Why?" Katara asked simply.

It was a subject Ursa used to ponder and poke like a loose tooth. It led to pain too: _Where did I go wrong?_

"Ozai always hated Iroh for being firstborn. Maybe he told himself he would treat his second born the way he wished he had been treated." Even then, they had been so much different as babies. "Zuko was a quiet baby. Azula…" She smiled to think of her newborn girl, pink and tiny with a cap of black hair, her face crinkled in anger, giving gusty shriek after gusty shriek. "She screamed. And she screamed. And she screamed a bit more. She screamed for most of her first few months in fact."

Ursa shook her head to think of how many doctors and midwives she'd consulted. They'd suggested colic, but there had never been any evidence. The only time Azula had quieted was when she nursed. Oh, what a sweet little girl she'd been against Ursa's breast, though her bright eyes had flickered about constantly in curiosity.

"I did everything I could to make her happy, but nothing would stop her cries…except Ozai. He would pick her up, tell her that Princesses do not cry, and she'd just…" Ursa waved her hand, her eyes on the amber of her whiskey. "She'd quiet down, look up at him like he was the most interesting person she'd ever seen, and smile.

"Zuko was such a happy baby. Azula wasn't, even when she outgrew that phase. And as a toddler… She had to do everything for herself. She screamed if I tried to help her with anything. She was mischievous from the start, but not like Zuko. She was sneaky and she lied. When she didn't lie, she pushed. It was like she had this compulsion to say 'no' to everything, no matter what. I couldn't break her of it. I couldn't punish her because she didn't care."

She didn't seem to mind if Ursa spanked her. If Ursa forbade her going outside, Azula would find a book with pictures or a firebending scroll to peruse. If Ursa took away her reading, she'd go outdoors. When Ursa finally resorted to locking Azula in her room, Azula picked the lock and snuck away, often until nightfall despite the dozens of servants sent out to find her. Ursa still shuddered to think of all the places her young daughter had wandered to in the noble district.

"The thing I remember most from her childhood… We have a fourth year celebration for our children." Ursa concentrated on her whiskey snifter. "It fell just before Zuko turned five. Ozai wouldn't come, though it's the father's duty to take his son that year. I told Zuko it was a private mother-son celebration, but he was still disappointed. We were gone for one night and most of the next day.

"When I came home, I checked on Azula. She was in bed, and her diaper was dirty. Ozai had dismissed all the servants that day for some asinine reason, so I can't imagine how long she was in that diaper. She had a horrible rash for weeks after that." Ursa took another soothing sip of whiskey. She rested the snifter against her cheek and focused on her memories.

"I told her, 'Don't you want Mommy to change your diaper?' She looked at me, a little one just about to turn three, and said, 'I don't want you. I want Daddy.'"

The pain she had felt in that moment was still sharp in her memory.

"So that makes it okay to emotionally abandon your child?" Katara asked in evident anger.

Ursa lifted her head in shock. She'd almost forgotten Katara was there, and now her defensiveness was sluggish to rise. "How dare you—"

Katara's face had flushed, and her hands shook with her anger. "How dare _you_. She was just a baby! I don't care if she told you she hated you, you never stop loving a child or turn away from one. No wonder she fixated on Ozai! Because you threw her away because she said something that hurt your feelings as a _baby_! You were a bigger baby than she was, and she was a toddler!"

"Don't presume to know my mind! That was only one case of many," Ursa snapped—feeling shame despite herself—angry with herself for the betraying tears that rose to her eyes. She set down her whiskey, angry at it too for making her soft. "Do you think I don't blame myself every day thinking of the abuse I must have missed? I was so stupid. I was so fixated on myself and Zuko that I forgot to protect my own little girl."

"It took three years before Azula stopped flinching every time I touched her," Katara said, her eyes bright blue with her anger. "Three years. When she dreams, she tells me she has to be perfect or Daddy will be unhappy. What do you think Ozai did to her to make her feel that way?"

"I didn't know he was violent," Ursa said. It was the truth. She knew it was the truth. She'd been blindsided at her first sight of Zuko's face. She'd been horrified when she'd noticed Azula's small but numerous scars. "I didn't know."

"How couldn't you? You lived with him for years!"

"We shared an apartment," Ursa corrected. "We lived in different rooms in that apartment." Rarely did Ozai even approach her for sex, though she had known he frequented Muma. She hadn't cared as long as he took precautions to ward against impregnating his purchases and bringing back a sexual disease. She told him at the beginning of their marriage if he gave her a venereal disease, she would cut his prick off. She'd meant it, and he'd known that. "We didn't share each other's life."

"Is that why you hate me so much?" Katara asked her in a strange tangent. "Because Azula and I have something you never did?"

Disgusting. Ursa leveled a glare at Katara, who didn't seem cowed. "I do have it," she said first. "And I want my children to have that happiness. But I certainly don't trust _you_ to bring that to Azula."

Katara's jaw slackened. "What?" she asked.

"All I see is Azula giving herself to you. You give her a few paltry months out of the year, and she waits for you faithfully instead of finding someone here who can give her a marriage and a life together. She has no _future_ with you, but she's the only one who doesn't see that."

The Water Tribe girl winced and her jaw tightened.

"Who knows if you have a husband or wife down there, and you only use Azula as a…sexual diversion and a way to see the Fire Nation when you need a vacation. I see absolutely no evidence to the contrary."

Katara's brow tightened, and her chin lifted again. "I love her, and I don't answer to you. The South Pole is my home. That doesn't mean Azula and I don't have a future. Just because we have separate lives doesn't mean we don't love each other."

"And the Fire Nation is Azula's. But she's a _princess_ of her nation. She's completely ruined her reputation with you. She receives constant criticism because of her relationship with you. She's bound herself to you legally, and I see absolutely nothing that you've given her in return."

"I don't have money. I don't have Fire Nation standing. But I can give her my love," Katara said sharply. "Something I don't think she's ever been given before. I love her, and I tell her that every day. I make her happy. Honestly, I don't care about you or what you think of me, but because I'm in this for life, we have to figure out some way to get along."

For life, Katara said. Ursa remembered Azula's ultimatum earlier that day. It felt like years had passed since that morning, but her daughter's sharp demand was fresh in her mind. _'Treat Katara as family because she is.'_

Ursa looked at Katara, saw the girl that Azula turned to instead of her own mother, and burst into tears. She'd lost so much time with her girl, starting far before she'd been banished to the Earth Kingdom. And before she could stake that place in her daughter's heart, this waterbender had made the claim. She was so afraid that what tenuous hold she had over Azula was going to slip away again. She was afraid that Azula would leave her behind to go to the South Pole and never come back.

"I don't want to lose her!" Ursa gasped.

Katara folded her into a hug, and Ursa found she had no desire to fight the embrace. She sobbed against Katara's shoulder, overwhelmed and exhausted and so worried. "How can I make it right with her? How can I make her love me?"

Katara's hug was comfortingly tight. "She does love you, Ursa. She always has. She just has weird ways of showing it." Katara squeezed her tighter for a moment. "Just because she loves me doesn't mean she'll stop loving you. Okay?"

Ursa's sobs eased to shuddering gasps, and she gained control of herself after a few minutes. She wiped her face with the handkerchief Katara supplied her. Katara released the handkerchief as she said, "I'm not your enemy."

Ursa gave a weak nod, too exhausted to fight this. "I know you make her happy."

Katara did something very kind then. She reached out, took Ursa's hand, and said, "You make her happy too."


End file.
